Fragmented Spend

Most businesses don't have a spend problem. They have a visibility problem.

Fragmentation is how that visibility quietly disappears.

The same category — office supplies, IT services, facilities, raw materials — ends up bought across a handful of vendors. Not by decision. By drift. Over time. Across whoever happens to be doing the ordering.

One person buys from the supplier they've always used. Someone else prefers another for a reason that made sense three years ago. A third goes with whoever sent a quote first.

Each call is reasonable on its own. The vendor's responsive. The price looks fine. The order goes through.

Collectively, something quieter happens: leverage dissolves.

Split $600K of annual spend across four vendors instead of one and you haven't spread risk. You've spread power — and given most of it away. The vendor holding 15% of your volume doesn't think about you the way the one holding 60% does.

I watched this play out for years in construction: the same material reaching a job through three or four suppliers because that's how the relationships had grown, and nobody ever adding it up. In the boom there was enough margin to hide it. In 2008 there wasn't. The pattern didn't change when I moved into larger procurement work. Only the number of zeros did.